Part 17

“Hey, there, Haggerty,” he called, “quit practising that deaf and dumb alphabet. You haven’t got any time to waste. You want to run along and get the missus to press out a pair of panties, and iron a boiled shirt for you. You’ll get your orders in the morning.”

“Come down for one minute,” choked Haggerty, his rage fanned to a white heat by the knowledge of his own impotence, for Spence, as he well knew, was safely entrenched behind locked doors. “Just one minute, an’ I’ll make your face look like it had never been born. I will that!”

“Haggerty,” said Spence in an injured tone, as the window closed, “you are disgruntled.”

But Haggerty was to be still more disgruntled, for the next morning, true to Spence’s words, he found himself assigned to Inspection Special Number Eighty-nine. Haggerty was not happy; but he boarded the forward car, as they pulled out for the mountains with the mental resolution that he would keep out of the super’s way.

Resolutions, however, like many other things, are sometimes rudely upset in the face of conditions that are not taken into account in the reckoning. They had been running at a forty-mile clip, and were about into the yard at Coyote Bend, when Haggerty nearly went to the floor as the “air” came on with a sudden rush, and the train came jerking to a halt like a bucking bronco. The whistle was going like mad for the block ahead. Haggerty grabbed his red flag, dropped to the ground, and ran back past the super’s car to take his distance.

Up ahead, he could see the tail end of a freight disappearing around the bend, crawling into safety on the siding. Nothing very interesting about that, somebody would get Tokio for laying out the Special, he supposed. Maybe the freight had had a breakdown, and was off schedule making the Bend. Personally, Haggerty did not care. It made very little difference to him. He picked up a handful of stones, and began to plug them at the nearest telegraph pole. Suddenly he changed the direction of his shots, and let fly with all his might at a gopher he had spotted squatting in front of his hole.

“Holy Mac!” he ejaculated in unbounded astonishment. “I believe I hit the cuss!”--and he went back to see.

Just as he got down the embankment, the Special began to whistle for her flag, “one--two--three--four,” and Haggerty, scrambling to the track again, began to run. But fast as he ran, he had only covered about half the distance when the train began to move. It was, therefore, a very breathless and panting Haggerty who just managed to grab the rail of the rear car--the super’s car!

There was nothing for it but to pass through and Haggerty, with his acquired swagger, started. The super was alone in the rear compartment, seated at a table, a mass of papers before him. Haggerty was industriously rolling up his flag as he passed along.

“Haggerty!”

Haggerty stopped and swung around at the sound of his name.

Hale reached his hand into a box of cigars that lay open on the table, selected one carefully, lighted it, and leaned back in his chair. “I would like to offer you one, Haggerty,” he said quietly, “but I am afraid you would misunderstand.”

Haggerty shifted a little before the super’s look. Somehow, there wasn’t any squint at all; instead, behind the glasses, the gray eyes were remarkably bright and clear, and their steadiness was discomposing--to Haggerty.

“It seems,” said Hale, a little smile playing around the corners of his mouth, “that they don’t measure men by the same standard out West here that they did when we were back on the Penn together, eh?” Haggerty reddened. His only belief would have been in bluster; but, curiously enough, there was something about this little man, he couldn’t tell just what, that made bluster impossible. Therefore, Haggerty held his peace, and his fingers played nervously with the flag, twirling it around and around awkwardly.

“Don’t make any mistake, Haggerty,” the super continued pleasantly. “I’m not trying to rub it in. I want you to know that I’ve heard the story. I want you to know that I didn’t nose it out. I heard it at the lunch-counter that day after you went out, and before the men there knew who I was. I want to start straight with you, Haggerty.”

Haggerty was puzzled and flustered at this opening. “Well, sir,” he blurted out, “of course you know it was all a lie. I only did it for a josh.”

“Yes, I understand,” Hale answered. “In itself it didn’t amount to anything, but the consequences are a little more than you reckoned on, aren’t they? It’s acted like a boomerang, and you’re pretty sore, Haggerty, aren’t you?”

The openness and friendly tones of the super took hold of Haggerty, and he warmed toward the other.

“Well, yes, sir, I suppose I am,” he admitted.

Hale nodded. “Now, I want you to see the other side of it, Haggerty--my side. No division of any railroad, or anything else for that matter, can do itself justice unless everyone connected with it is pulling together _for_ it. I want _every_ man out here with me, and first of all I want you. There is nothing destroys respect so much as ridicule. The division, much after the fashion that an epidemic of measles springs up amongst children, took it into their heads to dislike the successor of Mr. Carleton, no matter who he might be. Now, unfortunately, instead of having checked the spread, the germs are being fostered because, back of their fun with you, a description of contempt for me is constantly kept alive. So I want you to cooperate with me, Haggerty, and show them that, after all, whether I’m a holy terror or not, whether I’m a runt of a giant, no matter what, I’m entitled to a fair deal out here in the West. There, Haggerty, that’s a pretty long sermon for me. I’m not much at preaching. Just turn what I’ve said over in your mind, that’s all. I think I can safely offer you a cigar now. Will you have one?”

Haggerty accepted the cigar with a flustered mumble of thanks, and as he went forward to the other coach he chewed the end pensively.

“Well, how’s the little fellow? Hope the ride ain’t makin’ him car-sick,” sneered Slakely, the conductor.

Haggerty strode up to the other, and shoved his fist savagely within an inch of Slakely’s nose.

“I’ll have you know, the super’s all right, you walleyed coyote, you! I’m tellin’ you he’s a _man_. Do I hear any remarks to the contrary?”

“Say,” gasped Slakely blankly, retreating down the aisle, “what’s the matter with you, anyway?”

“That’s what’s the matter!”--Haggerty’s explanation was more forcible than explicit, though the meaning of his clenched fist which he shook at the other was pointed enough in its inference. “That’s what’s the matter, my bucko,” he repeated fiercely, “an’ don’t you forget it! I’m givin’ it to you straight, an’ I’ll take none of your lip about it neither! See?”

Haggerty had raised the standard. Not, perhaps, as the super had expected; but according to his own ideas, or rather to his fiery temper which led him to act blindly on the spur of the moment as his impulse directed.

But it was not this method of Haggerty’s, if such a term could by any stretch of the imagination be applied to Haggerty, that was to bring about the desired result, and at the same time rid him of his tormentors--tormentors who continued to sound the cry, “Where’s Haggerty?” with undiminished frequency--tormentors who were much too wary to allow themselves to be caught anywhere within striking distance, for Haggerty’s forearm was a thing to wonder at. Instead, the end came from another source as totally different as it was unexpected. It came on the third day of the inspection trip, up in the Rockies at the new bridge across the Stony River--and it was the new bridge that did it.

They were to lay out there for the morning, and Haggerty started in to employ the two or three hours of leisure this gave him by looking over the work. It wasn’t much of a bridge as bridges go, for the Stony wasn’t much of a river; but the approaches were enough to pull the heart out of the stoutest bridge crew that ever toiled and sweated and slaved. Just rock, solid, gray, massive; and so it was blast, blast, blast, hour after hour all through the day, day after day. One span, resting on the shore abutments, was to bridge the canon that yawned six hundred feet below, where the Stony swirled and eddied, a foaming, angry, chattering, little stream.

On the eastern side, where Haggerty stood, the anchorage was pretty well under way, but over across on the western shore they were still pitting their blasting powder against the stubborn rock of the mountainside. Haggerty crossed over on the old bridge to take a look at this. Just as he reached the other side a stationary engine blew shrilly for a blast, and the men began to run for cover. Haggerty pulled his watch and marked the time--one minute and fifteen seconds. Then the blast thundered, echoed, reechoed, and died away through the mountains. He joined the men as they went back to their work.

“Holy Mac!” he exclaimed to the foreman, as he peered over the edge of the excavation and looked down some fifteen or twenty feet to the ledge where the men were already busy again. “Holy Mac! You’ve got to look sharp, eh?”

“Oh, I dunno,” replied the foreman. “We give ‘em plenty of time. When the whistle blows the men hump it. We don’t touch the button till the last one is crawlin’ over the top of the bank. Then, with the time fuse, there’s a minute, lots of time.”

Haggerty looked on for awhile, then he turned away, sat down by one of the shanties, and loaded his pipe. The pipe once alight, he settled himself in a more comfortable position by sprawling on his back, his hands under his head. From where he lay, he commanded a view of the other side of the river as well as the work before him. He could see Hale across there talking to one of the bridge engineers. He watched the two men lazily, in drowsy contentment, until he lost sight of them as they started to come over to his side, then his attention became riveted again on his immediate surroundings.

They were getting ready for another blast. Haggerty sat up. It was rather exciting to see the men come scrambling out of the hole. The whistle had just gone three toots. They were coming now, one head after another popping up over the edge, then the shoulders, and finally the men on their feet running like deers for shelter--not far, only a few yards, for the excavation itself afforded protection, once clear of it. Haggerty himself was not fifteen yards away.

He counted the men as they came out. It was the eighteenth who, just as his head and shoulders appeared, waved an arm and shouted: “All out. Let ‘er go!” He saw the foreman bend over the battery and make the connection that would spark the timefuse at the other end, and then a groan of horror went up around him. Number Eighteen, with a cry and a desperate effort to pull himself over the top, had slipped back and disappeared from sight!

Haggerty’s pipe dropped to the ground from between his teeth, his heart seemed to stop its beats, a cold sweat broke out upon his face. He was on his feet now, and the foreman’s words were ringing in his ears: “Then there’s a minute, lots of time! _Then there’s a minute, lots of time!_”

He began to run, and the seconds, as he ran, lengthened into years and cycles. “My God!” he muttered in a catchy way.

But fast as he ran, someone was faster than he. Five yards from the edge of the excavation, a figure, small, short, speeding like the wind, passed him. It was Hale--the super!

Behind, the foreman’s voice bellowed hoarsely: “Come back! Come back! Ye can’t get to the fuse! D’ye hear!”

“Mabbe,” mumbled Haggerty between his teeth, “mabbe we can get the _man_. Mary, Mother, help us!”

Hale, flat on the ground, was making to swing himself over as Haggerty, for the second time, caught him by the collar of his coat. “You ain’t strong enough,” he grunted, yanking the super back. “You help me from the top “--and over the edge he went himself.

“Then there’s a minute, lots of time!”--the words came again unbidden. How much, in God’s name how much, of that minute had gone, how much was left? His teeth were set, his heart pounds so fierce and rapid that his breath came hard and choked, as he lowered himself to a little ledge, projecting out some seven or eight feet below the surface that had caught and held the body of Number Eighteen. The man lay there groaning. It was easy to see what had happened. A misplaced step in the climb, then a loosened rock, his balance gone, and the stone had crashed down upon his legs and ankles.

There was a look of helpless terror in the eyes of the wounded man as Haggerty reached and bent over him. “Get out,” the white lips quivered. “You ain’t got time. I give the signal. The blast ‘ll be goin’ now.”

“There’s a minute, lots of time,” said Haggerty in a sing-song, crazy way. He was trying to fit the words to an air he had heard somewhere. Queer he couldn’t remember it, the words were straight enough! Then he laughed--foolishly--as he worked like a madman!

He had raised the man in his arms and now, heaving with all his strength, was gradually pushing him up, up. The strain became terrific. Haggerty’s muscles cracked. One of his arms was almost useless to him owing to the narrowness of the ledge that, to maintain even a precarious footing as, little by little, he rose to an upright position, forced him tight against the wall of rock and earth. Haggerty panted with cruel, gasping sobs. “Then there’s a minute, lots of time!” The repetition of the words came surging upon him with a shock of horror, lending him a frenzied strength. A desperate twist, and he had made the halfturn that brought his back to the cutting. His other arm was free now. A heave, and he had swung Number Eighteen above his shoulders within reach of the super’s outstretched hands. A second more, and, with Hale pulling above and Haggerty lifting below, the man, with a cry of agony as his wounded leg banged limply against the ground, was forced up over the bank.

“Quick, Haggerty! For God’s sake, be quick yourself,” cried Hale. “Hurry, man, _hurry!_”

“There’s a minute”--Haggerty sprang for the top of the bank, clutched it--“lots of--” The last word was blotted out as he dragged himself over the edge, and heard Hale’s sharp command: “Lie flat!” From behind and below him came the roar of the detonation, he felt the ground shake and quiver beneath him, the echoes were rolling and reverberating like a park of artillery--then Hale’s low, fervent: “Thank God!”

It was Hale who got it first as the mob of men rushed forward, cheering, laughing, gabbling hysterically. And it was at Hale’s uplifted hand that the clamor died suddenly away, and in its stead came the super’s voice in quiet tones: “Where’s Haggerty?”

“Aw, gwan!” sputtered Haggerty sheepishly, trying to fight his way out of the crowd that pressed upon him to haul and maul him, to thump his back, to shake his hand. “Aw, gwan! I wanter get me pipe that I left over by the shanty.”

XII--McQUEEN’S HOBBY

There isn’t much use in talking about the logical or the illogical when you come to couple up with a man’s hobby, because a hobby is a hobby and that’s all there is to it--with nothing left to be said on the subject. Most men have a hobby. McQueen’s was coal--just coal.

McQueen talked coal with a persistence that was amazing. On all occasions and under any pretext it was coal. Was he off schedule with a regularity that entailed his presence on the carpet before the division superintendent, it was coal. Did he break down between meeting-points with the attendant result that the dispatchers fretted and fumed and swore as they readjusted their schedules and rearranged their train sheets, it was coal. Everlastingly and eternally coal.

“What’s coal?” McQueen would demand oracularly. “It’s carbon and oxygen and hydrogen with a dash of nitrogen, ain’t it? Well, then, what are you talking about? Coal _ain’t_ just coal, some of it’s mostly slate. Two hundred and ten pounds all the way, all the time, with the grate bars cluttered with that, huh! What?”

No purchasing agent that had ever hit the division had been quite able to satisfy McQueen with the brand of the commodity that was supplied in accordance with the requisition orders that he drew. And so, day in and day out, big 802 puffed her way through the mountains, and McQueen, in the cab, absorbed coal statistics, coal data, coal everything, with an avidity, a thoroughness, and a masterliness of detail, that would have put some noted geologists to shame and given the rest a run to hold their rights on the marked-up schedule.

Up at headquarters--when things were running smoothly and McQueen was behaving himself with no scores chalked up against him on the time-card--they treated his hobby as a joke. So that when his whistle boomed out of the gorge to the westward, or shrilled across the cut to the eastward, followed a moment afterward by the sight of the big, flying mogul with her string of slewing dark-green coaches, the staff on duty at Big Cloud would lean from the upper windows and watch the Limited as she shattered the yard switches with a roar--watch as, with a hiss of the air and the grinding of the brake shoes as they sparked the tires, she would draw up, panting, at the platform, and the big engineer would swing himself from the cab for an oil around. Then the badinage flew thick and fast while McQueen swabbed his hands on a hunk of waste and punctuated the remarks with squirts from his long-spouted can as he filled the thirsty oil cups.

So the big fellows laughed and joked, and the Brotherhood chaffed him unmercifully.

If anyone had asked McQueen what had started, let alone caused him to exhaust the subject of coal with such painstaking and conscientious insistence, he couldn’t for the life of him have answered. It had started--just started, that’s all--and, fascinating him, had pursued its insidious advance unchecked and unquestioned--that is, unquestioned until one morning when Clarihue, the turner at the Big Cloud roundhouse, kind of jerked him up a little on the proposition.

“You’re against the red, you and your coal, Mac, all right, all right,” Clarihue chuckled, as the engineer came in to sign on for the day’s run.

McQueen was patting 802’s slide bars affectionately. “How’s that?” he asked.

“Oil!”

“Oil?” repeated McQueen, puzzled.

“Sure thing! No more coal--no more slate--no more cinders--you touch her off, and there you are! You’ll have to cut out the coal and plug up on oil, Mac.”

“Oh!” said McQueen, enlightened. “Oil-burners, eh? I saw one of ‘em down East. They’re evil smelling, inhuman, stinking brutes, that’s what they are! don’t you let ‘em side track you like that, son. They may do down there, but not in the hills. Not while you and me are pulling throttles, and don’t you think so.”

Clarihue grinned.

“Well, mabbe,” said he. “But say, honest, Mac, what’s the sense of gassing about coal the way you do? What’s to come out of it? What’s the good of it? You just get the laugh from the boys, what?”

McQueen’s answer was to scratch his head. To put the matter into the concrete class of practicability was a phase of the subject that he had not considered. He scratched his head when the turner had gone; and, also, he scratched his head for several days thereafter. Then he caught at a happy inspiration whereby to solve the riddle, and therein he fell--but of that in a moment.

Things were booming on the Hill Division. Traffic was doubled, trebled. Everything on the train sheets was in sections. Promotions flew thick and fast. Wipers were set to firing, and the firemen moved over to the right-hand side of the cabs. Every wheel the division could beg, borrow or steal was doing fancy time stunts smashing records. Everyone from car-tink to superintendent, was on the jump. Even the directors, not to be outdone in the general order of things, worked overtime rubbing fat hands in gleeful anticipation of juicy, luscious dividends to be; only _they_ neglected to figure in Noonan as an item on the balance sheets.

Noonan? Where is the Brotherhood that does not number among its members men with grievances, fancied or real? Noonan had a grievance,--no particular grievance, just a grievance--and Noonan was a power in that branch of the Brotherhood that held sway over the Hill Division. Noonan always had a grievance; due, primarily, to the fact that he had a deep and long-seated grudge against himself. It dated way back--he’d been born that way.

“Grievances!” he spluttered to a group of his admirers. “Grievances? Why, we’re against the worst of it all the time. We’re not track-walkers, are we? Well then, who runs the road? It’s us on the throttles, what? Who’s to blame for our measly schedule of hours and pay? We are, ‘cause we haven’t the sand to stand up for our rights. That’s what, and don’t you forget it!”

There was a chorus of assent. “Noonan’s right,” said one Devins, “only it don’t look to me like now was what you might rightly call the time to growl. Times are good, everything’s double-headed, and the paycar’s running carload lots.”

Noonan glared. “You’ve got the brains of a piston head, that’s what you have,” he exploded. “It’s times like these we’d win hands down. Perhaps you’d like to wait till there’s nothing doing, and they’re laying the boys off and everybody, mostly, is running spare! What chance d’ye think any demands would stand then?”

Of a truth it was the accepted time and a most glorious opportunity. In that, Noonan was right. Only one obstacle lay between him and the accomplishment of his cherished ambition to make something of his trouble-hunting proclivities and become a leader of men--in a strike. That obstacle was McQueen.

McQueen was a company man. Out and out a company man; though nothing would have surprised McQueen more than to learn that he was looked up to as a leader by the conservative element of the Brotherhood. True, he and his coal was the joke of the division; but that was only a joke, and in no wise to be held up against him. His influence, of whose existence he was oblivious, was based on things apart from that. Big, kindly, honest, incapable of deceit, simple, straight-forward, staunch in his friendships, somewhat inclined to stubborness in his beliefs perhaps, easily ruffled but as easily pacified, such was McQueen. Such was the McQueen the officials honored, and such was the McQueen with whom the boys would gladly and loyally have shared their pay checks to the last cent.

All this Noonan knew. Knew, too, that to gain his end he must first win over McQueen. And to that object he began to devote himself. He and McQueen shared the honors of the fast mail, and under ordinary conditions communication between the two men was limited to a flirt of the hand from the cab as one or other of them tore by the siding designated as their meeting-point by the lords of the road, the dispatchers. But now things were a bit different, everything was more or less off schedule. And while the Limited, East and West, was nursed along as near her running time as possible, and generally got the best of it over everything else, there were, nevertheless, occasions when both men were stalled together on time orders at the same point.

Noonan tackled McQueen at the first opportunity.

He picked his way cautiously as though not quite sure of his rights and ready for a quick reverse.

“Say, Mac,” he began, “what do you think of all this talk that’s going ‘round?”

“Talk?” said McQueen. “What talk?”

“You don’t mean to say,” gasped Noonan, in well-simulated surprise, “that you haven’t heard it? And the boys are slinging it pretty hot, at that!”

“I haven’t heard anything,” McQueen answered, slightly suspicious that Noonan was about to spring one at his expense. “What you giving us?”

“Straight,” confided Noonan earnestly. “It’s strike, Mac, that’s what.”